In using the basic practice at the Hendricks Institute, and in various ways before that, I learned to ask the question, "What's the story I'm making up about________?" I think it's because at a young age I noticed that everyone's reality was true to them and thought, "How could that be!"
Well, the Basic Practice (BP) let me in on how that could be. The first step of the BP is to discern what happened. That's it. That's step one. And, I find that when I ask people about a situation, beginning with "What happened?" usually I'm told step two: the story about what happened.
I'll give you an example from my own life: "Hey Holly, what's up, why do you seem upset?" I say, "This girl dissed me on the public forum that I'm member of."...Okay, right there, do you see it? I told step two of the BP: the story. Not step one. Because I'm not saying simply what happened, I'm saying my story about what happened. What actually happened is a woman disagreed with me on a public thread. <---That's a clean step one.
Step two, then, is that I made up that since she has more experience than me people respect her more than me, that people listen and care about her opinion more than mine, and that my point of view will be dismissed. <---All of which is a total story. How can I know if any of that is true? And further, why do I care? Okay, well, that's a two-part deal. I'll save the caring about what they think for another post. My point is that step one is neutral, benign, and without victims or villains. My story, however, is not.
Truth is truth, despite what you may have heard lately. It's what's unarguably true. My meaning-making brain creates all kinds of crap that is arguably true, probably not true, or just plain dumb, but what happened is what happened...and you'll know you've gotten to it because it's not debatable
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